I'm putting tinfoil up on the windows
Lying down in the dark to dream
I don't want to see their faces
I don't want to hear them scream - Warren Zevon

An anonymous reader (of [link]) passed us a NetworkWorld link about an effort at DARPA to succeed in combat through networking. The idea is to keep soldiers in a position of informational superiority through a tactical radio network that would 'link' everyone together on the battlefield.

"Project WAND, for Wireless Adaptive Network Development, will exploit commercial radio components, rather than custom ones, and use a variety of software techniques and algorithms, many of them only just now emerging in mature form. These $500 walkie-talkie-size radios will form large-scale, peer-to-peer ad hoc nets, which can shift frequencies, sidestep interference, and handle a range of events that today completely disrupt wireless communications ... [right now] 'The average soldier on the ground doesn't have a radio,' says Jason Redi, principle scientist for BBN's network technologies group, and the man overseeing the software work. Radios are reserved for platoon and company commanders, in part because of their cost: typically $15,000 to $20,000 each, with vehicle-mounted radios reaching $80,000."

A new Department of Defense project is trying to use cutting-edge wireless research to create a tactical radio net that can adapt to keep soldiers linked with each other on the battlefield.

Project WAND, for Wireless Adaptive Network Development, will exploit commercial radio components, rather than custom ones, and use a variety of software techniques and algorithms, many of them only just now emerging in mature form. These $500 walkie-talkie-size radios will form large-scale, peer-to-peer ad hoc nets, which can shift frequencies, sidestep interference, and handle a range of events that today completely disrupt wireless communications.

WAND is part of a larger project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA [link] ) to create the Wireless Network after Next [link] , a complete military communications infrastructure. WAND has two teams of contractors and researchers, with BBN Technologies heading the software development and Tyco Electronics heading up the hardware development.

“The average soldier on the ground doesn’t have a radio,” says Jason Redi, principle scientist for BBN’s network technologies group, and the man overseeing the software work. Radios are reserved for platoon and company commanders, in part because of their cost: typically $15,000 to $20,000 each, with vehicle-mounted radios reaching $80,000.

Families of soldiers have bought off-the-shelf walkie-talkies from companies like Motorola and mailed them to troops in Iraq. “It’s a lousy way to communicate but it’s better than what they have now.”

WAND is an attempt to create low-cost radios with intelligent network software that does several things to make communications more pervasive, more efficient and more reliable in the battlefield.

One key technique is adaptive spectrum management. Radio spectrum today is divided into different bands, with each band assigned a particular use, for example, a slice for taxicabs, another for police, another for military use and so on. “But when you look at the actual use of the spectrum, much of it is not being used at any given moment,” says Redi. “Adaptive frequency management lets the radio ‘sniff out’ the empty bands and use them.”

Part of the WAND software will be doing this continual analysis of the spectrum covered by the radio. Another part will do opportunistic spectrum access, more commonly called dynamic spectrum access, to allow the radio to dive into that open spectrum and send and receive. As that band becomes congested or subject to interference, the software can shift the connection to another band, keeping the sessions intact.

Another part of the WAND software stack will draw from BBN’s work in disruption tolerant networks (DTN). Conventional routing protocols assume an end-to-end network path that stabilizes quickly. Based on that path, the net computes routes and creates the router forwarding tables. But repeated disconnections and long delays, common in wireless nets, break this stable arrangement apart. New routing protocols and code are being designed to move data from node to node as connections become available, holding information in persistent storage in the meantime.

Finally, the software will have to manage all this for large numbers of client radios. The WAND target is up to 10,000 nodes within a relatively small area. “Managing that connectivity is a really difficult thing because links will be changing all the time,” Redi says.

The software research in these various areas has been largely academic and still relatively recent, he says. The real challenge will be to bring all these together in a deployable, $500 radio that actually works in the field.

WAND is on a tight schedule. An initial technology demonstration is scheduled for January 2008, a second in September. “That’s pretty outrageous even for some simple technologies,” Redi admits.

===

Why Left and Right Must Unite

By Patrick Wood, Editor

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, who cared about political party affiliation? Men (and women) dropped everything to defeat the common enemy. Why? Because survival of their country was as risk!

We face just such a time as that.

We are being plundered by free trade, private-public-partnerships and international banks. Our food and product safety mechanisms have been systematically dismantled and are headed toward all-time lows. Our farms are being destroyed to extent that we are now net importers of food (and lousy food, at that). Our manufacturing base is almost completely gone as companies are bought and sent to cheaper labor markets.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Can you hear the crunching, tearing sound of our midsection being ripped open?

If either Republicans or Democrats could have fixed America, they would have done it long before now.

The more you look, the more you see that both major U.S. political parties are dominated by the same group of global elitists. The same super-rich foundations. The same NGO's. The same global bankers. The same lobbyists. The same global corporations.

Furthermore, the globalizers know that in order to keep our eyes off of them, they need to keep us fighting among ourselves over issues more petty than merely saving our nation from total extinction.

The fact is, if Americans would stop fighting long enough to see these hijackers for who they really are and for what they have done to us, they would puke them out of the U.S. in less than a country minute.

My message to liberals and conservatives of all flavors is this: "If you don't stop bickering and get down to business of protecting our Sovereignty, we aren't going to have a country left to bicker in!"

In other words, stop falling for cheap tricks that point you down infinitely contentious trails leading to nowhere. This only buys the enemy more time to make another thousand cuts on what's left of our already wounded carcass.

I have heard for years from both conservatives and liberals that we need to join forces to save America. But, the bickering just gets louder.

Enough, already!

My contribution to this mess is to offer a new social networking web site, LeftRightUnite [link] !, where all sides can get together in a constructive way, for a specific purpose -- to save the ship-of-state for another day.

If you don't know what a social network is, think MySpace.com or FaceBook.com. If you still don't know, you will just have to go there and grab a membership to find out. Either way, it won't cost you a dime.

With LeftRightUnite [link] !, you can blog, make friends, join action groups, locate people around you, organize protests, visits to your legislators, whatever.

Just don't sit still!

The software advances are part of an growing R&D effort worldwide to create what are called “cognitive radios” (sometimes called software-defined radios, which are smart enough to understand spectrum, network and user activities, and then select the right radio waveforms, frequencies and protocols for optimal efficiency, performance and reliability.

Tyco is working to create $500 radios that can span four independent channels from 900MHz to 6GHz, says Redi. The initial form factor delivered in September 2008 will be about the size of a large walkie-talkie, and shrinking with each new generation of radio technology. The goal is to avoid costly custom silicon and components, in order to exploit the economies of scale, and the rapid pace of innovation, in standardized, commercial wireless technology. The entire WAND project is part of a shifting mindset in military procurement to put more emphasis on rapid, cost-effective systems development, Redi says.

===

Bottom line: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century; they're also designed specifically to generate a (usually false) confession, not to obtain genuinely actionable intel. This isn't a matter of sacrificing moral values to keep us safe; it's sacrificing moral values for no purpose whatsoever.

These photos are important because most of us have never seen an actual, real-life waterboard. The press typically describes it in the most anodyne ways: a device meant to "simulate drowning" or to "make the prisoner believe he might drown." But the Khymer Rouge were no jokesters, and they didn't tailor their abuse to the dictates of the Geneva Convention. They -- like so many brutal regimes -- made waterboarding one of their primary tools for a simple reason: it is one of the most viciously effective forms of torture ever devised.

You can't have too much of a good thing, so let me just quote Mike Davis from 1998 to introduce Mike Davis 2007 on the California fires. In Ecology of Fear, his 1998 book on southern California, he wrote just about everything you'd ever need to know if you didn't want to be surprised by the raging Santa Ana-driven wildfires of 2003 or 2007. After all, there's nothing new about the burning phenomenon on what Davis then dubbed "the fire coast." "A great Malibu firestorm," he wrote, "could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees." No wonder Cold War era researchers used those California fires to model the behavior of nuclear firestorms.

Game developer/ perfume critic Theresa Duncan has died, and longtime companion Jeremy Blake is missing. The art world is buzzing about the seeming suicide-by-water of video installation artist Jeremy Blake. The perfume blogs are fizzing with sadness over the death of Theresa Duncan, whose suicide preceded Blake's. The cops are not releasing the notes left by the late, pretty people, but a clue might be found in the paranoiac screed Duncan posted on her blog in May, in which Blake's ex-girlfriend, the CIA, FBI, Church of Scientology, Jeff Gannon, bloated plutocrats and many other bugbears of the psy-ops crowd were put on Duncan's mental merry-go-round and given a real strong spin.

I'm putting tinfoil up on the windows
Lying down in the dark to dream
I don't want to see their faces
I don't want to hear them scream - Warren Zevon

And a further taste of RI's blog...

In October, 1963, a US Army private first class named Eugene Dinkin, working in Metz, France as a crypto operator with top secret clearance, picked up indications that "a conspiracy was in the making by the 'military' of the United States, perhaps combined with an 'ultra-right economic group." (The quote is from a declassified FBI report of April 3, 1964.) One of his duties as a code breaker was to decipher traffic that originated with the OAS, though he contended he first became alerted to a conspiracy by a study of subliminal "psychological sets" in Stars and Stripes and certain Hearst papers which, writes Lisa Pease, he believed "were deliberately maneuvered to set up a subconscious belief on the part of one reading these papers to the effect that President John F. Kennedy was 'soft on communism.'" He became convinced an attempt would be made on the president's life in Texas in late November, and that it would be pinned on the Left.

Alarmed, Dinkin wrote Robert Kennedy and then, realizing the warning had little chance of reaching the Attorney General, abruptly left his unit, going AWOL to try to contact ambassadors in nearby Luxembourg. On Nov 6 he showed up at the UN press office in Geneva. He couldn't find an American correspondent and so told his story to the editor of the Geneva Diplomat. On Nov 13 he was "hospitalized" by the US army in a closed psych ward and kept in virtual isolation until the assassination. On the evening of Nov 23 he was interviewed by a Secret Service agent who said that since Dinkin was in a psych ward he would be giving the government "absolutely no information."

He was transferred to Walter Reed in December and, in his words, "began receiving 'therapy' to help me understand that my warning of the assassination had been 'coincidental.'" He was told if he didn't improve he would be electro-shocked. Naturally, he feigned cooperation, "improved" and was released. His story, because it's told by a sick man, goes unmentioned by the Warren Commission.

CIA & The War on Terrorism
"Victory will come, but it will take time and require the kind of focused and sustained national commitment that we saw during the Cold War. Most importantly, it will require a relentless global campaign, joined by those in the Muslim world who are repulsed by al-Qa'ida's savagery, to expose the terrorists for what they are: peddlers of a hopeless, negative, backward vision of the world...."
— D/CIA Michael V. Hayden, speaking at the
Duquesne University Commencement Ceremony
May 4, 2007

General Michael V. Hayden, USAF, became the 18th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on 30 May 2006. As DCIA, he leads the Agency and manages the Intelligence Community’s HUMINT and open source collection programs on behalf of the DNI.

General Hayden previously was the first Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. With that appointment in April 2005, he received his fourth star, making him the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the Armed Forces.

General Hayden has wide experience in leadership positions throughout the Intelligence Community. From March 1999 to April 2005, he served as Director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Service (NSA/CSS), Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. General Hayden was Commander of the Air Intelligence Agency and Director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center, both headquartered at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas, from January 1996 to September 1997. From May 1993 to October 1995, he served as Director, Intelligence Directorate, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany.

General Hayden also has held senior staff positions at the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, as well as serving as Deputy Chief of Staff for United Nations Command and U.S. Forces Korea. He entered active duty in 1969 as a distinguished graduate of the Reserve Officer Training Corps program.

General Hayden holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and a Master’s degree in modern American history from Duquesne University. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 17 March 1945. He and his wife, Jeanine, have a daughter and two sons.

"Today, we face some of the greatest threats that any generation will ever know, and we must not be slow in confronting them. We must continue to emphasize integration across the Community to better serve our customers, provide frank, unencumbered analysis, and strengthen collection capabilities that continue to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable."

Mike McConnell
Director of National Intelligence

==

Counterintelligence

The Business of Intelligence
The Threat
The Intelligence Community at Work
Counterintelligence
In addition to collecting and processing intelligence about our enemies and reporting to our consumers, the Intelligence Community is also faced with the problem of identifying, understanding, prioritizing and counteracting the intelligence threats (from foreign powers) that are faced by the United States. This activity is known as counterintelligence.

Counterintelligence involves more than simply the catching of spies (counterespionage). It is, in fact, concerned with understanding, and possibly neutralizing, all aspects of the intelligence operations of foreign nations. As defined in Executive Order 12333, counterintelligence includes both "information gathered" and "activities conducted" in order to "to protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage or assassination conducted on behalf of foreign powers, organizations, or persons, or international terrorist activities but not including personnel, physical documents or communications security."

The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) serves as the substantive leader of national-level counterintelligence and coordinates and supports the critical counterintelligence missions of the United States Government. A Presidential Decision Directive (U.S. Counterintelligence Effectiveness - Counterintelligence for the 21st Century) established the NCIX, and outlines specific steps enabling the U.S. counterintelligence community to better fulfill its mission.

An associated activity is the National Operations Security (OPSEC) Program - a means to identify, control, and protect unclassified information and evidence associated with U.S. national security programs and activities. If not protected, such information often provides an opportunity for exploitation by adversaries or competitors working against the interests of the US. An Interagency OPSEC Support Staff (IOSS) manages the program. Its primary mission is to act as a consultant to other US government departments and agencies, providing technical guidance and assistance that will result in self-sufficient OPSEC programs throughout government.

Other Countermeasures [link]
Other defensive activities not usually considered counterintelligence include communications security, computer security , physical and personnel security, and proactive endeavors such as clandestine operations, deception, and the promulgation of disinformation.

==

Terrorism
Terrorism means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience – violence as evidenced in the US on 11 September 2001. Search the National Counterterrorism Center's (NCTC) [link] Worldwide Incidents Tracking System for in-depth information on terrorist incidents, groups, and trials.

Last night on Hannity and Colmes, guest host Kirsten Powers confronted Ann Coulter about President Bush’s failure to capture Osama Bin Laden and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

Coulter responded, “As for catching Osama, it’s irrelevant. Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan.” Powers blasted Coulter for her answer. Coulter then abruptly decided to end her participation in the middle of the segment, saying, “OK, well, good night! It was nice being here.”

For Ms. Coulter’s benefit, here’s an update on the situation in the last couple of months in Afghanistan:

– Security situation is “close to anarchy.” Last month, a senior British military commander said “the situation is close to anarchy” in Afghanistan, and warned western forces were “running out of time” to meet expectations Afghanis have for their security.

– Discontent among Afghans is “boiling.” “After months of widespread frustration with corruption, the economy and a lack of justice and security,” the New York Times reported that “doubts about President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and by extension the American-led effort to rebuild that nation, have led to a crisis of confidence.”

– Opium production is at record levels. “Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels - up by more than 40 percent from 2005 - despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money,” the Associated Press reported. “The increase could have serious repercussions for an already grave security situation, with drug lords joining the Taliban-led fight against Afghan and international forces.”

Crooks and Liars has more.

Transcript:

POWERS: Ann, let’s talk about let’s talk Usama bin Laden. How about let’s kill Usama bin Laden? How about let’s find Usama bin Laden? You’re talking about how, you know, Democrats don’t want to do things on terrorism, which I actually will in a second go ahead and list the things they want to do, but how about the fact we invaded Iraq, when, you know, over in Afghanistan everything was falling apart? And the fact that we let Usama bin Laden get away, and the president said he doesn’t even think about him, he doesn’t care about him.

BROWN: What happened to “mission accomplished”?

POWERS: What about that?

COULTER: I look forward to hearing that list.

POWERS: OK, you will in a second.

COULTER: But as for catching Usama, it’s irrelevant. Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan.

POWERS: No, they’re not.

COULTER: I mean, it’s like a fading movie star now.

BROWN: “Swimmingly”?

POWERS: Things in Afghanistan are going horribly. But this is interesting, Usama bin Laden is irrelevant. The person, the mastermind behind the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States is completely irrelevant. Is that what you’re saying?

COULTER: Right, it was handed to Bill Clinton twice.

POWERS: Oh, it’s Bill Clinton’s fault.

COULTER: And Bill Clinton said no…

POWERS: Yes, because I think that actually George Bush was president in 2001.

COULTER: I know you’re trying to imitate Alan Colmes, but at some point he does let me answer.

10 Nov 2007 @ 09:48 by jazzolog : HannitizedWouldn't it be great if Coulter and Hannity are having a little nooky on the side? How can we get that rumor going?

Nice pile of research here Vax. Man, you do get around! Soldiers in the field connected in communication somehow sounds like a godsend. Of course we know they'll all be wearing computer chips soon, connected to Central Command---but this other thing could save a lot of lives.

13 Oct 2009 @ 04:44 by vaxen : Wow...that comment by jazzolog was alomst three years ago! Amazing what time compression does to the meat puppet...going forward we go back. Going back we go forward. Zhi Xuan Ming Jen...